ABSTRACT
Post-socialist China is characterized by the loss of social and economic safety nets for workers, particularly the most marginalized. Scholars and others have assumed that informal laborers lack the associational power needed to mitigate the precarity of their lives. Drawing on ethnographic data collected between 2004 and 2016 in Chongqing, this article examines the ways in which precariously employed rural migrant men create their own safety nets by drawing on their past experiences of agricultural collectivization in the socialist era to form cooperative associations. It further explores how these men leverage cultural resources from the socialist period to retain male privileges. China’s decades of de-ideologized reforms and waves of informalization of work have not completely deprived migrant workers of the moral and symbolic resources which they use to make claims. Migrant informal laborers’ capacity for collective resistance in post-socialist times is deeply entwined with their gendered experience of work in rural, pre-reform China.
Acknowledgements
The author’s My heartfelt gratitude goes to the porters I encountered in Chongqing. Without their Without their generous help, I could not have completed this research. Many people have helped me with this this article. I would especially like to thank Sharon Carstens, Nicole Constable, Yu Huang, Lihong Shi, Mayfair Yang, and Yang Zhan for their insightful comments on different versions of this article. My gratitude also goes to the anonymous reviewer and copy editor for Critical Asian Studies.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes on contributor
Xia Zhang is a research faculty member and Instructor in the Department of Anthropology at Portland State University. She has done extensive research on migration, precarity, labor politics, gender, post-socialism, and more recently, new media and family ethics, in China and East Asia. Her work has previously appeared in, among other journals, Positions: Asian Critique, as well as in edited books.
Notes
18 For an overview of this discussion, please refer to Franceschini, Siu, and Chan Citation2016. They argue that younger migrant workers are not necessarily more aware of their legal rights than were the first waves of migrant workers in the 1980s and 1990s. For more discussion on this issue, please see Lee Citation2019.
26 Also see Lu, Zheng, and Wang Citation2017 for a discussion of the links between rural and urban activism in China.
27 Most local people in Chongqing assume that porters are men. They call female porters nü bangbang, emphasizing that these are rare. Women count for less than ten percent of the porter population. They are generally wives of male porters.
28 These estimates are based on a personal conversation with Shimin Jian, author of The Army of Bangbang in Mountainous City: Investigation of The Social Lives of Rural Migrant Workers (Shancheng Bangbang Jun: Jincheng Nongmingong Shehui Shenghuo Diaocha), September 21, 2006, Chongqing, China.
30 The average age of the porters I met between 2006 and 2007 was forty-one, comparable to what Jie Qin found (Citation2015). This is older than the average age of Chinese migrant laborers nationwide (39.7-year-old) (Investigative Tracking Reports on the Peasant Workers 2017).
31 This popular rhetoric of freedom among rural migrants is part of a discourse that produces self-responsible subjects, a technique of neoliberal governance. Also, this idea of freedom associates informal laborers with the stereotypical image of unruly social outcasts and further marginalizes these migrant workers.
32 Sworn brotherhood is a type of Chinese fictive kinship in which a boy or man has sworn to treat another as his brother. These relationships are common among male porters in Chongqing. These men often enter this relationship to emphasize or prolong a close friendship that has already developed among them, for economic reasons, or as a means of gaining social advantages. In many cases, male porters develop such a fictive brotherhood relationship by working together for a long time and building mutual trust. In other cases, a shared native place or shared last name also contribute to the development of sworn brotherhood relationships. In contemporary Chongqing, sworn brothers often refer to each other as “brother” (ge, gan gege, xiongdi, or xiongdihuo).
33 As of 2015, four of the six couples in Brother Yang’s group had bought their own houses in urban Chongqing. They have since moved out of the shared house but continue to work with the other two couples as a team. They only collect everyone’s daily earnings for equal distribution if they have a major task that demands multiple days of group work.
34 I observed cases in which the leader of a male-only group was given a slightly larger portion of collective earnings, especially if he contracted out a major job to his group. But in many cases, the group leader and the general members equally distributed the earnings. I was told by a group leader that unequal distribution of money could create disharmony among the members and break the members’ trust in the group leader.
44 Jacka (Citation2005) suggests that migrant women think of their parents’ homes and villages where they lived before marriage with nostalgia, but they do not have the same emotional ties to their husbands’ birthplaces, where they lived after getting married.
45 Sometimes, both men and women went shopping together, but the men paid because they controlled the money.
46 As individual men, they did take up housework occasionally, especially when their wives were occupied with paid work. For example, Sister Liu, Lao Chen’s wife, was subcontracted to make rice dumplings at a supermarket for a month in 2007. While she was occupied with this work, Lao Chen replaced her as a cook and worked with the other women in the kitchen.
47 The production team was the basic farm production and accounting unit in the commune system between 1958 and 1984.
57 Gong chan gong qi is a propaganda slogan that the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) used during the Republican period (1911–1949) to accuse communists of being devils who forced people to share their property and wives.
Additional information
Funding
This work was supported by the University of Pittsburgh, Chancellor’s Graduate Fellowship in Chinese Studies; and the Portland State University Open Access funding.
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9861-5390
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